SINGAPORE STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery Aaron Curry’s ebullient sculptures, recently surveyed in “Fragments from a Collective Unity,” are stretched, swollen, sometimes barbed, and slightly off-kilter. A plethora of organic-looking things filled an entire wall, some wriggling from side to side, some becoming jack-in-the-boxes and popping up from an opening here or there, and yet others more closely approximating bones and remains than life itself.
Phyllida Barlow
LONDON Royal Academy of Arts As “cul-de-sac” demonstrates, Barlow’s skill in courting accident and chance remains unsurpassed. While her materials—plaster, cement, steel, wire mesh, plywood, timber, and fabric—are rooted in the sculptural canon, her methods of deployment are freed from any past constraints.
deCordova New England Biennial 2019
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum A few years ago, the deCordova Museum, famed for its outdoor sculpture collection, transposed its name in order to focus attention on the sculpture park. Yet in choosing this edgy group of 2019 biennial artists, exhibition curators gave short shrift to those who work in three dimensions, admitting only a handful.
Ajlan Gharem
VANCOUVER Vanier Park Six months after Ajlan Gharem’s Paradise Has Many Gates was unveiled in Vancouver’s beachfront Vanier Park, the little mosque made of chain link and steel pipe began to feel like part of the scenery.
“The Death of James Lee Byars”
VENICE Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione The installation’s aesthetic appeal resonates universally with its emphasis on beauty and absence. For those familiar with Byars’s work, it furthers his legacy of conceptual vigor, exploring the unknown and unknowable.
Petah Coyne
NEW YORK Galerie Lelong & Co. Petah Coyne’s recent solo show in New York, after too long an absence, clearly demonstrated that she has lost none of her visual and narrative verve.
Jeffrey Gibson
CLINTON, NEW YORK Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College A series of helmets—arguably even more extravagantly decked out—similarly conjure references across cultures and chronologies, threading together the politics, economics, and socio-religious rituals of dress, adornment, pattern, and decoration. They, and the other works in “This Is the Day” (from a Biblical psalm, hymn, and synth-pop song), activate and amplify its jurisdiction and readings.
Claudia Wieser
LONDON London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE Materials and epochs collide and dissolve in “Shift,” which places the Modernist-inspired forms of Berlin-based Claudia Wieser in dialogue with ancient artifacts excavated from the ruins of a Roman temple from the third century AD.
Yoonshin Park
RIVERSIDE, ILLINOIS Riverside Arts Center An accomplished paper sculptor, the Chicago-based Park crafted each pillow in “Passing hours, space in between: I am breathing your air” from delicate white paper, seamed and sewed precisely; inside each is a hidden mechanism inducing the slightest movement in the center of the pillows, mimicking the rise and fall of a sleeping person’s torso.
William Kentridge
NEW YORK Park Avenue Armory The Head & The Load, an installation and collaborative performance piece involving almost three dozen musicians, dancers, vocalists, and spoken word performers, along with processions and projections of Kentridge’s drawings and sculptures, is set during World War I. Like all of Kentridge’s work, however, it resonates with contemporary meaning.
